mbarker | is it that unusual?

I really surprised our friend last evening. She's late 20s or early 30s, quite pregnant, and we had taken a group to Nara to see the evening lanterns (it's obon season, and they light up the stone lanterns, so you can walk in the evening and enjoy).

At the train station, though, she was looking for a bathroom. And my wife was looking around, too. When they mentioned what they were looking for, I walked over to an attendant and asked where the bathrooms were. He immediately explained, and I thanked him. The women looked at me in shock, although we soon walked over to the bathrooms. Along the way, our young friend asked me if I wasn't embarrassed.

I thought about it for a moment, then told her that when I was in college, someone asked me to buy tampons. When I returned from the store and gave them to her, she also asked me if I was embarrassed. I simply laughed and told her I had two sisters, so this was not unexpected.

Somehow, asking a station attendant for directions to a bathroom, especially with an evidently pregnant woman, doesn't qualify as embarrassing to me. Not asking for directions might?

Sometimes I think I didn't get the right social training. There are things that people expect me to be embarrassed about that simply seem like necessities to me. And then I'm puzzled when people are surprised. What do they expect someone to do in these kinds of situations? Just get angry, or ignore it? That doesn't sound like a sensible way to resolve it?

I guess I'm just a pragmatist at heart. Need to know where something is? Ask someone who should know for directions. It's pretty simple.